I thought it was a decent issue, just not desperately new or different.

It was very reminiscent of Chuck Dixon (in both a good and bad way). Seeing Dick as a competent but fairly regular well-adjusted guy is always nice.Annoyed at STILL no scene of the handover from Dick back to Bruce, and how Damian reacted to it.

Bad side is that yet again, Dick, after making an impressive physically, but hardly challenging combat at the start, is used as the punching bag by a mysterious new villain to prove how badass he is, and ends up with broken ribs (a serious Dixon trope).

I'm also sincerely hoping that the last comment from the new villain isn't some sort of indicator of Dick having a "Deep and mysterious past", I really don't want him to have one of those, really, REALLY don't want. (Also wondering if it ties in to the events of this weeks Batman #1.

What are you just saying thats what usually happens, or is Dick really injured after fighting some no name villain in issue 1 of his book? Because I am playing on picking them up next month and I really, really don't want to have to read about "injured" Nightwing for months on end again.

I'm crossing my fingers that they will do a handover scene later. Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the actual Batman title still at 5 years ago? I can easily imagine that they will show the handover when they snap back to now.

Everything else is set in the present - Batman especially doesn't need a 'set in the past' series, since he's not gotten a significant change in his status quo. (And if they were to give him one, it probably would have been Detective.)

Batman is current day. Snyder intends to play with some of the same themes that he and Higgins started in 'Gates of Gotham'. I expect a heavy emphasize on Gotham's past but the comic is definitely set in Gotham's present rather than 5 years in the past like Justice League and Action comics.

I got the impression the last comment wasn't a mysterious past issue but a current misunderstanding/frame-up thing. Though now that I think about it, if the circus is in town, maybe it's trying to somehow bring his past into it. But since he apparently isn't aware of being what the guy accuses him of, whatever is in his past is probably nothing to actually do with anything he himself has really done.

Thinking about it gives me flashbacks to that awful mini that suggested that Dick's entire career is making up for being involved in a conspiracy to murder someone when he was 7. Because that's totally something young Dick would do.

There was also the Nightwing miniseries that had as it's plot the notion that the Graysons had been murdered because they had accidentally witnessed the assassination of the child despot of a handy Eastern European country.

Which of course was NOT the case, but it was an uninteresting notion to begin with (It's only claim to fame as a series is that it introduced the blue V and fingerstripe costume.

I tried reading this as if I were a new reader, and it worked better than a lot of the #1s, IMO. A hand-off scene wouldn't have made it better for someone just coming in, while enough of Dick's past was covered in his musings to let us know what his past might have been. The ending might have been 'more of the same' for Dick, but most of the #1s ended with similar 'cliffhangers', so I didn't find it particularly targeted at Dick as being inept in any way. The circus thing has me intrigued simply because that background separates him from the rest of the Bat-clan (unless you include Kathy), and the past might be slightly different this time around than in the 'old' universe. (To top it off, there's the upcoming Babs crossover and the final page of Batman #1!)

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